Tonight I got player health done. That short sentence sums up a lot of work in code, FRBDK, Illustrator and Photoshop!

First of all, if you have been following the progress you’ll immediately notice the helicopter changes. These colors are far from final. I revised some graphics to give the helis more contrast and made it so they could be easily colored in code. The helis also pass their color to their death explosion so it rains debris in the right color.

You also will notice a very faint healthbar in the image above. The healthbar has a default alpha (hint: it’s a Glue variable so it’s easy to change). It also has an alpha fade speed (guess what? Another Glue var). The bar is 100% opaque when the heli is taking damage and fades back to the default over time. I think it’s a nice effect that shows you important information without cluttering the screen a lot. Here is a heli with the bar at max and min alpha:

When the health hits zero you get a nice explosion (three total particle effects triggered) that is still a work in progress and little bits of helicopter rain down as shown above. Here’s the falling debris of a yellow heli:

As usual, I’m too tired to post any code so if you have questions just comment and I’ll answer whatever I can. Also, I post screenshots because I use Windows Movie Maker to render video and it never does the game justice. The video is 30fps 480 and the game is 60fps 720 so the animations and effects look weird and everything is pixelated. But here it is…